The Midnight Front--A Dark Arts Novel

by David Mack

  At the end of the L-shaped hallway’s shorter leg, past an open door to a lavatory and a bath, was the top landing of a spiral staircase. Cade edged over to the stairs. Tantalizing aromas of roasted meat and baking bread wafted up and roused the hunger in his belly.

  His fists tightened on the poker. Could be a trap. But what choice do I have?

  Careful steps muted the scrape of his soles on the stone stairs. He kept his right shoulder to the outer wall during his counterclockwise descent, hoping to glimpse anyone who might be coming up before they saw him.

  He paused at the next floor. It resembled the top floor, though its halls described a T. Opposite the staircase landing, at the other end of the top of the T, another windowed door led outside to the keep’s lower battlements. Cade was tempted to see if it, too, was locked, but promises of bacon and cinnamon lured him farther down the stairs.

  I should be looking for an exit, not a free lunch. So why can’t I stop?

  Golden light and hushed voices spilled over Cade as he neared the bottom of the stairs. He passed a closed door on his left as he huddled in an archway that opened into a banquet room. Suspended by a thick chain from a ceiling of oak timbers was a wrought-iron chandelier with electric lights. The room’s mortared stone walls were decorated with tapestries, trophies, and painted portraits of Scotsmen in kilts or uniforms of centuries past. Wool rugs whose crimson had faded to hues of dusky rose lay parallel to one another on the hardwood floor.

  From his vantage in the archway, Cade saw two peaked arches on the far side of the banquet room. Between them stood a white marble piscina similar to ones he had seen used for ritual ablutions in church. In the middle of the room, a dining table with matching Windsor chairs extended beyond his view. The voices he heard came from its far end.

  Arrayed on the long table was a feast: roasted duck, glazed ham, bowls of sautéed beans with bacon, a platter of baked potatoes. Wicker baskets were piled with baked rolls, and a pie with a golden lattice crust sat on a trivet at the end of the table nearest him, venting vapor and teasing him with scents of apple and caramelized sugar. Crystal decanters of red and white wine stood half empty next to a bottle of scotch.

  A gruff Scottish voice called out. “Come in, already!”

  Cade froze and held his breath. He hadn’t made a sound, he was sure of it, and he’d been careful not to lean out far enough to be seen. Surely that summons hadn’t been for him?

  “Aye, Mr. Martin, I’m talking to you. Do come in.”

  Dueling impulses froze him in place. Fear told him to charge around the corner, swinging the poker at anyone between him and the nearest way out. But a morbid curiosity compelled him to find out how a man who couldn’t see him had known he was there.

  Still holding the poker, Cade rounded the corner.

  Seated at the table, a motley quartet looked at him: the strangers he’d seen at the battle in the sea. At the table’s head was the well-weathered gent who had accosted Cade in Oxford. The man was stoutly built and dressed in rumpled clothes in need of a washing. His unkempt gray beard partly hid his yellowed teeth as he stood and smiled. His Scottish brogue was thick. “Hello, Cade. I’m Adair.” A queer look at the poker. “I don’t think you’ll need that, do you?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  “Healthy suspicion. Can’t say as I blame you.” He gestured to the trim, flaxen-haired man seated on his left. “This is Stefan Van Ausdall.”

  Stefan set down his napkin and rose to greet Cade with a bow of his head and a shy smile. He appeared to be in his twenties, but he dressed like a gentleman twice his age. His voice had a strong Dutch accent. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  Adair nodded at the man next to Stefan. He was younger, with light brown skin, a wavy crown of black hair, and dark eyes. He dressed like a man born to a rural life and hard work, but there was a spark of genius in his countenance. “This,” Adair said, “is Nikostratos Le Beau.”

  A blinding smile. “Call me Niko.”

  Cade tried to place his accent. “Algeria?”

  His observation amused the rustic-looking youth. “Oui!” He tugged his earlobe and waggled a finger at Cade. “You’ve a good ear!”

  The master turned toward the last of his cadre, a young woman who Cade guessed was close to his own age, or maybe younger. “And this is Anja Kernova.”

  Her pale, oval face was framed by unruly curls of sable hair. She possessed a cold beauty, but when she turned her head to look at Cade, he felt her gray eyes pierce his mask of normalcy, as if she could look into his deepest core of weakness and shameful secrets. Unnerved, he wanted to look away, but he was captivated by her scar. An old wound dominated the left side of Anja’s face: an asymmetrical Y-shaped gouge that branched from the corner of her mouth to the bottom of her eye and the lobe of her ear. Her gaze was cold and aloof, and it made Cade want to shrink into the shadows. He was grateful when she turned away without saying anything.

  Adair cleared his throat, freeing Cade from Anja’s fearsome affect. “I’d introduce you, of course, but my apprentices already know who you are.”

  “All too well,” Niko muttered.

  “Manners,” Stefan said, his correction firm but kindly, like that of an elder brother.

  Cade noted the crests on the front of the mantel, as well as the two flags on either side of the fireplace: Britain’s Union Jack to the left, and Scotland’s red Lion Rampant on a field of gold to the right. “I know we’re in Scotland, but where, exactly?”

  “Eilean Donan Castle,” Adair said, “just outside Dornie.”

  “This is your keep?”

  A humble shrug. “I’m not its laird, but I’m kin. Clan Macrae, to be precise.”

  “How did I get here?”

  “I plucked you from the sea and brought you. For your own good, of course.”

  Hearing of the sea dredged up Cade’s grief. Despite the months he had lain insensate, for him the tragedy was still raw. Memories overwhelmed him: Fleeting visions of the Athenia ablaze and sinking. Tentacles crushing his mother and dragging his father into the abyss. The blast of cold darkness that had plunged him into temporary oblivion. His sorrow was too fresh and the hole in his life too deep to pretend they were in the past. Tears stung his eyes, so he faced the stag’s head displayed high above the fireplace while he fought to recover his composure.

  Adair struck a somber note. “You were all but dead by the time we got you here.”

  “Petrified,” Stefan said. “Like a victim of Medusa.”

  Niko balanced a steak knife on his fingertip. “I took you for a statue.” He set the blade spinning. “Thought you might look nice downstairs in the billeting room.”

  The master glowered at Niko. “No cantrips at the table.”

  The youth palmed the knife and set it by his plate. Adair softened his aspect as he looked at Cade. “LEVIATHAN’s parting shot left you stuck between life and death. We spent the last sixteen months working to pry you from the reaper’s embrace.” He tilted his goblet toward his taciturn female colleague. “But to be honest, Anja did most of the work. Healing magick is mostly her bailiwick.”

  It was hard for Cade to believe he had heard correctly. “Magick?” His query drew odd reactions from the foursome. “So everything I saw the night my parents died … that was real?”

  Adair’s mien darkened. “Very much so. And quite deadly.”

  His grief found a new companion: fury. “What killed my parents?”

  The apprentices and their master exchanged troubled glances. Adair stalled by taking a long sip of his wine and clearing his throat. “Would you say you’re a pious man?”

  Cade struggled to reconcile all that he’d once believed with all that he’d now seen. “I was, as a boy. After I got to Oxford, I started reading a lot of scripture as metaphor. But now…”

  “Now you’re not so sure.” Adair nodded. “The attack was set in motion by the Nazis’ top magician, but the agent of your parents’ demise was a demon called LEVI
ATHAN.”

  “But why? Why them?”

  Niko blurted, “It was not there for them. It was sent for you.”

  “For … me?” He remembered the warning Adair had given him in Oxford. The warning I ignored. “You told me this would happen. That if I tried to run … I’d put my parents in danger.” Panic clouded Cade’s mind. “They died because I didn’t listen.” A desperate look at Adair. “The other passengers who died? I did this to them, too?” Adair said nothing, but Cade’s heart filled with guilt to match his grief. Tears ran down his cheeks, and he fought to keep himself from going to pieces. He dropped the poker. It clanged on the floor as he backed away from the table.

  Adair shuffled toward him, one hand extended, palm up. “Hold fast, lad, it’s not that simple. It wasn’t your—”

  Shattered, Cade interrupted with a raised hand, “Which way leads outside?” Adair pointed at the archway to Cade’s left. Cade verified the passage was empty. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you in Oxford. But, please”—he took the scotch from the table—“just let me go.” Whisky in hand, he left the banquet hall, desperate to find comfort in solitude, oblivion, or both.

  * * *

  A freezing wind blew in off Loch Duich, but Cade’s face felt as if it were on fire. Lacking a coat, he had blundered out of the keep into the winter night. Ice had made a hazard of the stone steps that curved down to the castle’s multilevel courtyard. Now, hunched in an archway looking out on moonlit water, he winced as his pulse pounded in his temples. Breathing came only with effort, as if his lungs had forgotten how to work. Anguish collided with denial; then both were consumed by his anger before his guilt devoured and disgorged them all to repeat the cycle.

  He downed a long swig of peaty Ardbeg and savored its bite in his throat. Questions and accusations flew through his troubled mind. My fault. But I didn’t know. How could I have known? Why didn’t Dad tell me? And why’d that thing want me?

  Behind his back, he heard the bump of the door at the top of the steps. He looked at Adair, who’d had the wisdom to don a heavy coat before braving the weather. The master navigated the stairs with caution, then crossed the grounds to Cade’s side beneath the seawall. “We should have a word.”

  Cade downed another mouthful of scotch. “It’s your house. Talk all you want.”

  Even through his overcoat, Adair stank of wine, whisky, tobacco, and sweat. Looking more closely at the man’s careworn features, Cade noted irregular gaps in his graying beard and scabbed-over scratches inside his ears. The haggard Scot sighed. “First, I want to be clear. Your parents did not die because of you, Cade. They died for you.”

  Cade was too tired and morose for semantics. “What’s the difference?”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t cause the attack.”

  “Yes, I did. You said it yourself: I put them in harm’s way by staying with them.”

  Adair sighed. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “Watch me.” Cade looked west into a darkness with no horizon. “How long to get to Glasgow from here?”

  “Why?”

  All of Cade’s words came out in anger. “I need to get home. I have to tell my grandparents what happened. This isn’t the kind of story you put in a telegram.”

  Adair’s frown deepened. “I regret to bear more bad news, but you’ve nowhere to go.”

  “What are you talking about? My grandparents—”

  Adair shook his head slowly. “Gone. All of them.”

  Cade felt the foundations of his life crumble beneath him. “What? How?”

  “On the record, their deaths were accidents. But I have it on good authority they were killed by a demon like the one that took your parents. One sent by the same enemy.”

  “The Nazis?”

  “Their chief karcist. A dark mage who goes by the nom de guerre Kein Engel.”

  “Never heard of him. What does he have against me?”

  “You’re his competition, and he wanted you out of the way. I knew he’d come for you, but I had no idea he’d be so … thorough. Even if you’d heeded my warning in Oxford, your family would still be dead and gone.”

  Through the gloom, Cade thought he glimpsed a silver lining. “If the rest of my family is gone, that means I inherit everything, right? Am I rich, at least?”

  More regret. “You were declared dead when the Athenia sank. That and the magickal ward I put on your back were the only way to hide you from Kein. Alas, your father was an only son, just like you, so when you were all declared lost at sea, and your grandparents were found dead, the Martin estate was claimed by the American government.”

  Cade simmered with resentment. “So I’m not just an orphan. I’m broke and I’m legally dead? Twenty-one years old, and I’m a ghost without a country?”

  “Chin up. Could be worse.”

  “Really? How?”

  “If not for me and my adepts, you’d actually be dead.”

  He recoiled from the older man’s smug insinuation. “Am I supposed to thank you?”

  “A wee bit o’ gratitude might be in order.”

  Cade stalked into the middle of the dark courtyard, then turned to shout at Adair. “If you wanted gratitude, why didn’t you save my parents?”

  The master’s anger surged like a river breaking through a dam. “You don’t think I wanted to? That I didn’t try? I told your father to bring you here! You and your mother. I promised him you’d be safe here, that I could protect you. But he didn’t listen. He scarpered off, as if there’s anywhere on the face of the earth that Hell couldn’t fucking find him!” He paced in the archway while he reined in his temper. “By the time my familiar Kutcha found you on the ship, I barely had time to warn you about the torpedo. And I’d no idea Kein had called up LEVIATHAN until I saw it rise out of the water. By then, there was fuck all I could do.”

  Reproached, Cade moderated his tone. “You knew my parents?”

  “Aye. I knew your father well. We were mates a long time.”

  “Did you—?” Cade paused; he couldn’t believe he was asking such a bizarre question without jest. “Did you learn magick together?”

  A sad smile hinted at fond memories. “Not exactly. I was his teacher.”

  “Teacher? But you’re not that much older than him.”

  Adair chortled. “I’m older than I look, laddie.” He folded his arms. “Guess my age.”

  “I don’t know. Fifty-five?”

  “Close. Three hundred fifty-seven.” Adair grinned as Cade stared, jaw agape. “One of the benefits of a life in the Art.” He lifted his arm, and Kutcha the raven fluttered down to perch on his wrist. “Your father was a good pupil, but his interest in the Art was more academic than practical.” He gently stroked the bird’s feathers. “All the same, he meant the world to me. Which is why I spent the last sixteen months searching for some way to free you from LEVIATHAN’s spell.”

  “You spent sixteen months just trying to save me?”

  His question made Adair frown. “Not just that, no. I also spent the last year training new magicians.… And sending them to their deaths.” He fed a crumb to Kutcha, then dismissed his familiar with a twitch of his arm. He pulled a flat silver case from his coat, opened it with one hand, and with the other plucked out a cigarette. “All the mages I sent to Europe were murdered by Kein and his adepts—a woman named Briet and a man named Siegmar.” Adair stuck the cigarette in his mouth, put away the case, and flipped open a stainless-steel lighter. He lit his smoke and took a drag. “I’ve lost more than ninety apprentices in the last year. I’m fresh out of qualified recruits, so I’ve had to focus on making my last few adepts the best they can be. Quality over quantity, as the saying goes.”

  A pungent cloud from Adair’s cigarette enveloped Cade. “What now?”

  “First, I’ll tell Churchill about your recovery, news I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear.”

  “Wait—you answer to the prime minister? Who are you people?”

  A weary
drag; then Adair replied through a mouthful of smoke. “A top-secret magickal warfare program. One I convened within the Special Operations Executive, at His Majesty’s request. Our mission: stop Kein and destroy the Thule Society, his army of black-magick dabblers. We’ve been ordered by the Ministry of Defence to deprive Hitler’s war machine of its magickal support at all costs. Until Kein and his followers are dead, the Nazis’ hold on Europe will be unbreakable. Unless we succeed, the Allies have no chance of liberating Europe.”

  Another drag. Like a dragon, Adair exhaled gray vapor from his nostrils. “As of now, the Soviets are the Eastern Front; England is the Western Front. And the five of us left alive in this castle … are the Midnight Front.” Another slow puff, followed by a series of smoke rings. “Forgive my manners—care for a fag?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “If the war doesn’t push you to it, the Art will.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wielding magick is one of the most grueling things mortal flesh can do. It won’t be long before you need to take your mind off the misery that demons bring.”

  Cade realized he was being invited to embark upon a bold and dangerous path.

  Can this really be happening? Magick? Demons? He couldn’t deny what he’d seen. I watched a nightmare murder my parents. I felt it try to kill me. It seemed impossible, but the horrors he’d faced at the sinking of the Athenia told him that the orderly, logical world he’d always believed in was a lie. Now he wanted to know the truth, about everything.

  Even more than that, he wanted justice.

  Self-conscious about being so easily read—or perhaps manipulated—by the master magician, Cade adopted an aloof pretense. “Who says I’ll be studying magick?”

  The tip of Adair’s cigarette flared as he took another pull. Smoke spilled from his nose and mouth as he spoke. “I don’t have time to sugarcoat this. Like it or not, the Midnight Front is all you have left. And not to put too fine a point on it, we need you. There’s lots to be done, and little time to do it. So … are you ready?”